Don't stop swaying
by girl orpheus
Summary: True Love doesn't seem to be in the cards for a girl made of reason like Aino Minako. [live action]


**Title:** Don't stop swaying   
**Author:** Alena Fryin  
**Summary:** True Love doesn't seem to be in the cards for a girl made of reason like Aino Minako. live action  
**Rating:** PG-13 for sexual situations, bad language  
**Disclaimer:** I own nothing, and am making no money off this story.  
**Notes:** I apologize in advance if the canon is off. I haven't watched an episode of _Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon_ in about a year, so I'm working off what I remember.  
**Word count:** 1,652

**Don't stop swaying**

_Yo sister,  
You sure heard me  
Singing in the rain for some love._  
-- Sophie B. Hawkins

Petrol and rubble making puncture wounds in the skin of the world, a sky that looks like an epic stretch of spilled pomegranate juice. She is in her element, hands shrink wrapped in the delightful, simple gloves of a solider.

This is her, and there is no Aino Minako.

They tell her a tumor is huddled in the center of her brain. They show her the lines of diseased cells expanding from the main mass like highways branching out to the suburbs, like Tokyo seen from the satellite whose dust is still caught in Venus's goddess gold hair.

They tell her that she doesn't have very long and look at her like she's supposed to know how to react. Doctors are used to hysterics; they look at you like you're a recent immigrant from well, the moon when you don't say anything.

There are certain things you should never tell your manager, whose ass is the size of the continent, who spends his nights fucking girls two years your junior. There are certain things you should never tell your manager, even if he seems to care more about producing a new album before you die of cancer than the fact that you are, you know, dying of cancer.

This is one of them.

"Go shove a copy of that CD up your ass, you bastard."

You should not hang up your cell phone after telling him this; it makes you look like a sixteen year old girl.

Which Minako is.

She's going to die, so she goes to a no name club in a no name district and orders a Cosmo at the bar. She's disappointed when it arrives; it looks like someone dumped the contents of her lava lamp into a nice glass and told to drink up.

She takes a sip.

It tastes like it, too.

The guy is blonde and American and older. He wears glasses that turn flash bulb pink as the strobe lights circumnavigate the dance floor and looks like the type to collect shit. Not comics, because true otaku forgo bathing until their BO starts bringing about the unfortunate demise of house plants, but he hordes his valuables, whatever they may be. Stamps, vintage photographs, old, old books. Something pretty and useless, bordering on ancient.

Something like her.

He also looks like the type of guy who thought about bringing a gun to his second hour PE class and coped out at the last second, which is also why she does not hesitate to plunk down in the seat across from him. She is sure to hike her skirt up just a bit as she sits down.

"Hello," she says, crossing one leg over the other.

She knows how to do this; she's seen a lot of movies.

She's going to die.

Might as well get laid, since True Love doesn't seem to be in the cards for a girl made of reason like her.

This is a hotel room. Mr. Blonde American is here on business.

Minako is not surprised.

Mr. Blonde American's hand kneads at the back of her tube top until it is hiked up somewhere in the region of her trachea and this would totally be wrong if she wasn't over the age of consent. It's still totally wrong, because this guy is a little younger than her manager but not by much.

She's sure they're not linked by strings of DNA, by alternating strands of blue and pink licorice, which is good. He's a gaijin, she's a native, but that doesn't mean he isn't a criminal recently escaped Alcatraz, Azkaban, another one of those infamous "A" prisons.

He could be anyone. She didn't ask--it wouldn't be polite.

So, she's not making out with a guy she's related to on top of a hotel vanity, but it's possible he's an ax murderer.

Good for her.

She's making out with a guy she met two hours ago and his hand is up her shirt and her legs are locked around his waist, the ankles crossed at the foundation of his spinal cord like the rickety branches of the world tree.

He's a man, she's a girl-woman, this is normal. He's Mr. Blonde American and she's Sailor Venus, Minako and it's Friday night and the weary world forty nine stories down is rejoicing like in the Christmas carol, TGIF, let's break out the fucking Champaign.

He's a man, she's a girl-woman.

This is normal.

Someone knocks on the door. "Charles, you in there?" the mystery person asks through three inches of oak stolen from the forests of Canada, from the bears and the beavers and the Mounties.

"I'm busy!" says Charles, severing the newest kiss.

_Indeed you are_, Minako thinks and crushes her mouth against his in what she hopes will come off as desperation.

"I don't understand," says Usagi. She must be speaking close to the phone's mouthpiece; Minako can hear every breath ushered out of her lungs. "I don't understand why people hurt one another."

"Neither do I," says Minako, and knows all too well.

She fingers the cork screw coil of the cord attached to her own telephone and watches the blue-purple light from computer screen creep over the helix. She shouldn't be having Deep and Meaningful conversations with a ditz who made the watching the news with her parents and ended the half hour program by slinking off to her not-princess tower to cry.

But.

Minako wants to put her arm around the other girl's shoulders, sing every lullaby and bubble gum pop tune she knows until the Usagi falls head first into the peaceful land of sleep, a kingdom with no war in Iraq, no AIDS in Africa, no men who blow themselves up in pizza parlors.

"We should do something, you know? We should change things, make it so that no one can ever hurt anyone again," Usagi says. "We should change the whole world. It's what super heroes do."

"Okay," says Minako, and doesn't tell her about Robespierre, Stalin, Mao.

Revolutions, she has found, have a tendency to suck.

First kisses are like cotton candy blizzards, painfully sweet and overwhelming.

Minako receives hers when she is eleven, and it isn't quite like that. Close enough, though.

His name is Kenji, and the two sides of his face don't quite line up right when he smiles. He has rock star hair that falls over one eye no matter how he combs it. She isn't expecting it, and she doesn't think he is either.

They are talking, passing the time in the immediate aftermath of class, and he leans over the bike rack and plants his lips on hers like she is a normal girl, like the masses never screamed for her, like she can't feel the strength of ages catch her throat every time she breathes, like she wasn't a wanna-be misanthrope who might die tomorrow because she is eleven, and she _is_ a normal girl. Venus is a planet, not a weight in her mind and belly, and duty, honor are ideas that expired with the samurai.

He kisses her and then, in an act of self-preservation, flees.

Minako is eleven, and she is happy.

Minako and Rei have been training for less than half an hour and already they are screaming at one another.

Dante and Virgil probably fought like this in the dark wood, Dante up in arms over the lack of light and justice and his bella donna, devotion crowning her dark hair. Hansel and Gretal spit and spat when their bellies were full of hot, oily hunger instead of the sweets they would later come across buried deep in a nightmare.

People do this when everything is royally fucked up and there's nowhere else to turn.

"I'm trying to teach you what you need to do to protect her!" Minako shouts.

They're hiss-spitting their way through the conversation, but Minako doesn't think it's a big deal when Rei shoves her up against the wall ten seconds later. Her jaw clicks when the other girl's tongue edges into her mouth like it was chuckling in disapproval, amusement, all on its own.

She kisses Rei back.

The window ledge digs into her spine.

People do this when everything is royally fucked up and there's nowhere else to turn.

Today, she and Rei go shopping and share a strawberry ice cream that tops the cookie cone it sits in like snow on a Himalayan peak and nobody recognizes her and she doesn't faint once and she doesn't hate being _her_.

She gets lots of kisses when the other shoppers aren't watching.

It is a good day.

She's not in love, so just forget it.

Rei's nose crinkles when she laughs.

She's not in love, so just forget it.

Rei tastes biting into the first peach of summer.

She's not in love.

Let it go, okay?

When you're about to die, your life is supposed to flash in front of your eyes, everything from the moment you slide out of your mother screaming from the sudden drop in temperature to your first day of kindergarten to that time you tripped down the front steps and broke your arm and spent the afternoon in the emergency room with stupid kids who had blown their fingers off with July fire crackers and car accident victims and grandmas with head colds.

Minako isn't thinking about that.

She's thinking about stars, about how they're all made of stars, about how everyone is beautiful and the same because they are all made of stars. And she, she admits, how Rei's nose crinkles when she laughs.

She's okay. She's going to reborn again, restarted in a body that won't hurt her.

It's okay. Death is just another door, right? And one of those doors, those many doors, will lead her back here.

**FIN **


End file.
